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The 2011 class blog for students taking COM115.9, a course on contemporary horror cinema.

Final Projects

The final project for the course is a group presentation on the film you have chosen. The objective of your presentation, regardless of whatever film you use, is to justify why that film is worth studying in a formal academic setting.

(For an alternative way of looking at this same objective, you may think of your goal as having to convince me that you understand why I chose to screen that particular film in class this semester.)

As I’ve been saying in class, you don’t necessarily have to appreciate the film in the basic sense of liking it, but you do have to be able to appreciate it in the broader sense by being able to place it against the context of the ideas we have been discussing in class since June. You have to understand the film as a response (whether positive or negative) to the ideas from our course readings.

Be creative as possible in making connections: while I will not prohibit you from using only one reading for your chosen film, you may expect that an attempt to substantially link more than one article to the film in question will be far more impressive. (Unless of course, it’s obvious that the connections you are drawing are strained.)

I would very much prefer you follow a pecha kucha format, with each presentation having exactly twenty slides with each slide held in place for only twenty seconds. This means that your presentations will last for six minutes and forty seconds. This will force you to be creative in your thinking, snappy in your visuals, and enthusiastic in your voiceover.

You must upload your finished presentation online by 11:59 pm of 15 October 2011, which is the Saturday of finals week. Anything submitted after that time is considered a late submission. I leave it up to you to choose a place to upload it (YouTube, Vimeo, Prezi, Slideshare, etc.), but you must include the URL of your video as a comment on this page that anyone can click and access.

Here’s an incentive for submitting earlier than the mentioned deadline: if your classmates end up commenting on your video here, I will give your group points for credit. If you have any questions, please ask here or in class.

Here’s a list of the films that have been chosen by the groups. Please verify your selections and group members. Let me know if there’s a problem by commenting at the bottom of this page.

“Lycanthropy, originally used in literature and cinema as a metaphor for male puberty was used as a metaphor for female puberty, in that the protagonists and/or werewolves were female.” Interesting! I didn’t see this one coming. 🙂 This is such a good analysis of the theme of the movie. 🙂
Well, I agree with the idea of the monstrous feminine being in the context of patriarchal and phallocentric. I also agree that Ginger Snaps tries to present this sort of feminism premise–women proving they’re strong [stronger than men].
I commend the incorporation of many themes discussed in class–abjection, gender/sexuality, monstrous feminine, production and reproduction, woman’s gaze, etc.
Honestly, talking about the aesthetics or the visuals of Ginger Snaps, I say the movie is not that promising and, to some extent, not even worth watching. But after hearing and watching this I say there’s really something in this movie: that Ginger Snaps is worth studying in a formal academic setting.

I appreciate that you comprehensively explored Ginger Snaps’ main theme in terms of feminist film theory. Indeed, the werewolf represents a different kind of sexual politics that is not phallocentric (i.e. the lack of power is the lack of a penis). However, we do know that Ginger gets annihilated in the end, so how does that figure in terms of Williams’ ideas? In terms of Barbara Creed appropriating Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, I think it would also be interesting to elaborate more on why they… “embrace” their abjection, especially with regards to their fascination with gore.

Nonetheless, kudos on exploring the representation of women here.

P.S. I don’t think that the way the film appropriated lycanthropism as a metaphor for puberty was revolutionary. In terms of being female werewolves, perhaps, but I think it would be a better film if it used a more subtle and not-in-your-face metaphor.

I just took a Sex Lit class and I think this would have been a great final essay, as it puts issues such as child sexuality and demonization at the forefront. it was great how you pointed out the degendering of the vampire figure combined with “her” presentation as a child and combined it with the theory of the gaze. Issues of age and sexuality were dealt with thoroughly.

After watching this movie a few years ago, it immediately became one of my favorite movies of all time. That being said, I’ve initially known prior to watching this video that Let the Right One In is indeed a movie that’s worthy of the academe, but I must say, your arguments opened my eyes a bit more to this fact. The comparisons with other vampire movies made one understand how Let the Right One In differs and stands out. Yes, this might be a biased point of view because I’m a big fan of the film, but your group’s arguments really justify this. Highlighting the innocence of the kids in the movie as opposed to the usual explicit sexuality of the vampires tackled the added “otherness” of both characters in the movie. Aside from this, there’s the example of Eli as a literal castrated male and the vampire’s sucking of blood as compared to the female’s milking of the sperm. With these examples, we can see how Let the Right One In not only works to entertain, but it also showcases symbolisms that require academic attention.

Yeah, I think it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking. John Calhoun made some comparisons with the original novel it’s based from, and I figured that the film was very subtle with its adaptation. No need to be in-your-face, and it had a pristine mise-en-scene and everything…

Agree with the idea that Eli embodies the adult fear of children. It’s interesting how Eli is a young girl as opposed to vampires who are portrayed as adults, because portraying the “monster” as a child provides us viewers with the opportunity to explore the familiar (children) through unfamiliar contexts (children as vampires, or vampires as children).

I like the way that you posed the impasse of Grace’s female representation of Madeline as a mother bent on doing anything, primarily in terms of Mulvey’s idea of the (visual pleasures of the) gaze (in Linda Williams’ “When the woman looks”) as “‘devirginized’ from the situation… shifting… to a sexually liberated female.” Also, Barbara Creed’s use of Julia Kristeva’s idea of the abject fits this to a tee, and I love how you elaborated on how it demonstrates this well. (I think the other film that’s more explicit about this is A Tale of Two Sisters). It was also a keen observation to look at what it means to have a predominantly female cast in terms of the issues of representation you set forth.

I think in terms of all the films we’ve watched, we’ve observed how particularly “ideologizing” the cinema is in terms of gender. Our discussions on film theory and the horror film do seem to affirm that indeed, all cinema is political. Grace, in particular–I think–still perpetuates the ideologies of a patriarchal society. Good job!

I will agree that the entire birthing scene…super creepy and I will agree with Pao at how a lot of the films we’ve watched really does have something to do with gender specially the male bias, but yeah Grace was also probably the best example of it, lesbians,birth,motherhood its all in there

I think you did a fantastic job framing the nature versus nurture psychology that happened to May. I think the film offers a rather lucid explication of what led to May’s peculiarities. Also, I think applying the concept of the abject, the corpse in particular, is called for because of how big a metaphor it plays in the film.